Blacks Deserve Bodies Too!: Design and Discussion About Diversity and Race in a Tween Online World

Kafai, Cook, and Fields examine how race is represented through avatar design in Whyville, a virtual world for tweens, arguing that avatars are central to identity formation and that race has been understudied in online environments relative to gender. Their central finding is a persistent disparity: although roughly one-third of Whyville's avatar faces were black-toned, most of these faces lacked matching bodies or were paired with white bodies. Their analysis of the platform's face-part and body inventories, alongside Whyville Times articles and a 2006 community event, shows that peach-toned parts dominated availability, with 84% of bodies for sale in 2006 in that color family, while brown, olive, and yellow options remained scarce and were largely produced by a small number of designers.

The discussions recorded in Whyville's player newspaper from 2000 to 2006 reveal recurring calls for collective action, personal accounts of racism directed at players using minority avatars, and growing criticism of the default peach "newbie" face. That default was eventually changed to blue in 2006 following the "Bluebie Invasion." The authors conclude that user-generated content improved the variety of face colors, but body diversity lagged behind, and that racial dynamics in the virtual world reflect real-world patterns, even though explicit discussion of race occurred infrequently.

The study also finds that these supply constraints shaped how players could express identity and interact with one another. Over time, Whyvillians came to recognize that responsibility for creating greater diversity rested with the community itself rather than solely with the platform's designers. The authors argue that virtual worlds present an educational opportunity for designers to create space for conversations about race, particularly because tweens are at a developmental stage in which ethnic identity is actively forming.